Composer Joe Chindamo already ranks among Australia’s most accomplished musicians, but really, he’s just getting started.

“I only wrote my first orchestral piece 10 years ago, and I’m just loving it,” he tells Limelight. “It feels like every piece is a reinvention, a new lease on life, you know? I’ve never enjoyed music more. I have no fear there,  I’m genuinely excited. I want to walk into that fire.”

Joe Chindamo. Photo © Olivia Chindamo

He’s had a rich and varied musical career. Chindamo picked up the accordion at age six, and made the move to piano as a teenager, kicking off a prolific and decorated career as a jazz performer, but he’s found his home in classical composition.  

The classical sphere isn’t new territority at all: he’s recorded his own versions of Puccini arias, Scarlatti sonatas and Mozart works, and performed his own reworkings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations with violinist Zoë Black on the Carnegie Hall stage, and earned nominations twice for Best Classical Album at the ARIA Awards (Chindamo is wary of the term ‘cross-genre’ – a meeting of comfort zones, he says, rather...